Politics trumps common sense

Published 4:07 pm, Monday, October 15, 2012

A poorly worded one, maybe, but nothing more than that. Bridgeport is a heavily Democratic city and the Election Day outcome here will not surprise anyone. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

But, this being the height of the political season, even innocuous comments are seized upon as if they could turn a race upside down.

That's what happened last week to Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch. As he toured the city with Rep. Chris Murphy, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate this year, Finch made an offhand remark: "We may come in a couple days late," he said, "but you can be guaranteed you're going to get the vote."

This was a reference to the 2010 election, by all accounts botched, where the city did not have enough ballots on hand and ended up causing confusion, long lines and a delay in official vote-counting as new ballots were photocopied and hand-counted.

It did not, according to an exhaustive post-election investigation, result in any extra votes for Democrats. To the contrary, analysis showed the photocopied ballots actually cost Democrat Dannel Malloy hundreds of votes in a very tight election.

If that's an example of voter fraud, the perpetrators had a funny way of going about it. Incompetence is a much better explanation.

But the campaign of Linda McMahon, Murphy's Republican opponent, pounced on Finch's comment, and conservative news outlets nationwide picked up on the issue. This, they were saying, is what we've been talking about -- voter fraud is real, and it's the reason why all these voter ID laws have been passed around the country.

Obviously, Finch's remark proved nothing of the kind. And voter ID laws are a cure for a nonexistent problem. The issue of in-person voter fraud -- one person pretending to be someone else and casting a ballot -- is almost unheard of in this country, despite claims to the contrary.

Regardless, the McMahon campaign announced Sunday the hiring of former Republican State Party Chairman Herbert Shepardson to oversee Election Day monitoring activities. Election law, of course, already provides a role for observers, so no one is quite sure what this will entail.

Regardless, Finch's remark was a joke. Voter fraud is not. It's also not an issue in this case.